This has not been Chris Christie’s week. Which is really saying something.

On Tuesday, a Monmouth University (N.J.) poll showed support for the New Jersey governor tumbling into eighth place among likely New Hampshire Republican primary voters. Just 4% of the 467 people surveyed said Christie was their…

Few recent news stories have united Americans in outrage and anger as fully as the revelations about Minnesota dentist Walt Palmer’s illegal poaching and killing of famed African lion Cecil. From Jimmy Kimmel’s heartfelt monologue to the impromptu, growing collection of stuffed animals piled in protest outside Palmer’s office, from Facebook petitions arguing for Palmer’s extradition to Zimbabwe to the voluminous quantity of negative Yelp reviews of his dental practice, critiques of Palmer’s actions have come from all corners of our culture and society. In an era when we can’t seem to agree on anything, there seems to be widespread consensus that Palmer did something deeply wrong.

Donald Trump’s lawyer’s comments that marital rape isn’t a crime rightly inspired outrage. They were both offensive and wrong on the law. Sadly, however, Cohen’s comments reflect the prevalent view that marital rape is not “real” rape, a view still informing the law on the books and in practice.

Never have so many done so much to reveal so little than in the collected journalism about presidential nomination contests. The personality-driven trivia. The hokey generalizations. The bogs of conventional wisdom. The day-by-day scorekeeping that ends up worse than uninformative; it is anti-informative. (Just ask Presidents George Romney, Edmund Muskie, Scoop Jackson, John Connally, Richard Gephardt, and Hillary Rodham Clinton.) The utter failure to inform the public of the actual, on-the-ground dynamics of the nuts-and-bolts process by which the parties chose their standard-bearers, and the larger dynamics that drive party trends from decade to decade.

Twenty-five years ago this past Sunday, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law. Today, people with disabilities are less likely to be employed than they were before the law was enacted. Workers with disabilities earn, on average, about $14,000 less than similar workers without disabilities. About one in every three disabled Americans lives in poverty.

For the past season and a half, the pair has framed their sketches within the structure of a road trip with an unspecified destination, not unlike the one that Key and Peele themselves have taken us on over the past four years.

Last weekend former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee escalated the rhetoric of opposition to the Iranian nuclear deal to new, wild levels during an interview with the wild-child conservatives of Breitbart News:

The Donald Trump news cycle is not ready to burn out yet, not while his lawyer, in a very Trump-like show of belligerence, told a reporter that spousal rape is legal when it most certainly is not. This week, the Daily Beast issued a timely reminder that Ivana Trump accused her ex-husband of raping her in 1989 during her divorce deposition. Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen denied this by arguing “she felt raped emotionally” but not criminally, whatever that means. (The one described in Harry Hurt III’s 1993 book Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump, actually sounds just like a criminal rape, complete with physical violence.)

But there was one thing up in the air: Which of the Duggar family-sized team of wannabe Republican presidential candidates was going to grab the brass ring as the most opportunistic exploiter of this non-scandal? This week, it looks like the winner of this stiff competition is the dark horse: “libertarian” candidate Rand Paul.

“This is a forum where our candidates can share their faith and testimony and not feel ostracized. Except maybe by the press,” Mary Frances Forrester told me. “Here, we can ask questions and candidates can include their faith when they’re talking about important social issues.”